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Date: 1764, 1773

"In cloister'd state let selfish sages dwell, / Proud that their heart is narrow as their cell!"

— Shenstone, William (1714-1763)

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Date: 1764

"Each nobler aim, repressed by long control, / Now sinks at last or feebly mans the soul; / While low delights, succeeding fast behind, / In happier meanness occupy the mind: / As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, / Defaced by time and tottering in decay, / There in the ruin, heedless...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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Date: 1765 [1764]

"No, Isabella, said the princess, I should not deserve this incomparable parent, if the inmost recesses of my soul harboured a thought without her permission."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

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Date: 1765

"O ye pure inmates of the gentle breast, / Truth, Freedom, Love, O where is your abode?"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

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Date: 1766

"Would you have me tamely sit down and flatter our infamous betrayer; and to avoid a prison continually suffer the more galling bonds of mental confinement! No, never. If we are to be taken from this abode, only let us hold to the right, and wherever we are thrown, we can still retire to a charmi...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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Date: 1766

"Curse not the king, yea, no not in thy thought, / Nor in thy closet curse the rich for ought"

— Nicol, Alexander (bap. 1703)

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Date: 1766

"Her breast is like a cabinet of goud, / Wherein the richest jewels are bestow'd"

— Nicol, Alexander (bap. 1703)

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Date: 1766

"Wisdom, which men with so much pain, / With so much weariness attain, / May in a little moment quit, / And abdicate the throne of Wit, / And leave, a vacant seat, the brain, / For Folly to usurp and reign."

— Lloyd, Evan (1734-1776)

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Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.